The well-known Parisian weekly L'Express
recently published an article by Jean François Revel entitled "La fin des
berceuses," that is, "The End of Lullabies." The dictator Tito
appears on the cover in a photograph one could call surrealistic, but which in fact, is
magnificently realistic, thoroughly revealing his sinister face, physiognomy
and mentality. The matter, treated with elegant French precision, includes an
introduction, an explanation divided into twelve points, and a conclusion. The
title could, perhaps, be more precise. It speaks of "lullabies" but
the article deals with only one of them. There was at least one more of
transcendental importance. As a matter of fact, the two lullabies did not put
to sleep just any two babes, but a mother and son who are respectable and
unique. The mother is 2000 years old; the son, 1500. Apparently decrepit, the
mother on close observation shows signs of a life that will last as long as the
human race. But her poor son, only some centuries younger, shows in his speech
an accentuated arteriosclerosis of the brain; and in his movements, an advanced
case of Parkinson's disease.

The son is the Latin-Germanic world that rose out of
the Barbarian invasions of the 5th Century. The Holy Roman Catholic and ApostolicChurch gave him
supernatural life by baptizing and evangelizing him, thereby bringing him forth
for Christian Civilization. The mother — how it pains us to say it — from
various points of view appears so old, so shriveled, that from certain angles
she gives one the illusion that she has been dead for quite some time. On
attentive analysis from other angles, however, she shows beyond any doubt that
her life is indestructible. The aging she manifests from time to time is but a
transitory epiphenomenon, a macabre episode that at the end of each process
(today's has reached a literally unimaginable apex) never results in death but
rather in a new springtime. The more tragic the wintry
symptoms of hopeless senility, the more splendid the springtime.

Revel's article concerns only the West, the States of
Europe and America.
The Church seems absent from his field of observation.

The explanation of the article's title is right in the
first paragraph: "Why has `detente' failed? — Because
in the mentality of Westerners it meant the suspension of Soviet
aggressiveness, and in the mentality of the Soviets, the suspension of all
Western response to their aggressiveness." So that lullaby was `detente,'
and the drowsy infant, the West.

The West alone? No. The
Church, which encompasses not only the West but the whole world, has also
suffered the numbing effects of a similarly lugubrious lullaby. I can affirm
it, now more than ever, because I was one of the constantly diminishing few who
affirmed it with unflagging continuity all through the years when nearly the
whole world appeared to be lulled in that sinister sleep.
Among the Catholics on center stage, no thought was considered so obtuse and no
style of action deemed so hickishly backward and
counterproductive as that of anti-communism.

In that twilight of anti-communism, the owls soon
began hooting for joy as darkness was covering everything. The cocks, crowing
their unshakable hope the light would return, were being muffled. But now at
the dawn of the cold war, the owls are growing silent; the hens gaily awaken,
apparently intent on cackling louder than the cocks
crow. As the media discover that detente is over, I can already hear the
festive hubbub of certain anti-communist voices that had been prudently silent
until just recently, Ah! How delightful it is to be an opportunist!

The Soviet lullaby aimed at Catholic opinion was the
same one sung for the laicized states of the West, merely adapted to religious
themes. It began during the reign of Pius XI as "the policy of the
extended hand." The vigorous Pontiff silenced the serpent's canticle in
1937 with the Encyclical, DiviniRedemptoris. But Jacques Maritain,
the suave philosophical meadow lark, took up the melody again under Pius XII. Even
though this Pontiff maintained the irreducible and polemic position of his
predecessors toward Communism, he let the philosopher sing. When John XXIII
ascended to the papal throne, the lullaby spread to ever wider areas of the
Church. At Vatican Council II, the mutism of the august assembly toward the
greatest adversary the Church ever had in her whole history — a silence that
will scandalize centuries to come — plainly indicated that the lullaby was
already victoriously putting the whole Catholic world to sleep. In saying this,
I am not going beyond Paul VI's own testimony. He lamented that the Church was
going through a mysterious process of self-destruction (Allocution of 12/7/68),
and that the "smoke of Satan" had penetrated her (Allocution of 6/29/72).
These two affirmations clearly referred to a desolation
even greater than the torrential infiltration of Communism in Catholic circles.
For we must also take into account the expansion, so akin to
it, of progressivism. After all, in the final analysis, what is
progressivism but a philosophical, theological and canonical disguise of the
Communist wolf?

I propose to do something much simpler. Take Revel's
list of the illusions with which the Soviets' lullaby put the West to sleep and
transpose it to the religious and ecclesiastical sphere, stressing the
similarity of its effects on the Catholic world.

This is what I shall do in the next article.

In the guise of a bridge to the next article, I cite
again the opening phrase of Revel, duly adapted: "Why has detente led the
Catholic world to a failure? — Because in the
mentality of the Catholics it meant the suspension of Soviet aggressiveness,
and in the mentality of the Soviets, the suspension of all Catholic response to
their aggressiveness."